Second questions, should we go for the RTX 2060 or GTX 1660Ti (which is about 300$ cheaper). Seems like the GTX 1660Ti shows only about 10-15% less performance, not sure its really worth the extra cost. Will either be able to make use of GPU for compression?

Jens Jarke Thanks. We actually already have many BMD devices used on MBP's. But ya, we are looking into NDI in future. Have you seen any difference in CPU usage when using NDI vs. Blackmagic/Thunderbolt decoding/encoding?

I'm not an apple fan I have to admit. My windows system is relaxed with either of them. But I haven't compared or meassured. And the fact that I didn't looked at it is maybe an indication that there isn't much difference. If, I would have noticed. Running on a laptop you need to look closer because resources are so more limited.

Jens Jarke Im an apple Fan for most things, but lately we've been inclined to PC's for streaming, so looking at 1 laptop & 1 desktop. Any configuration suggestions are welcome. Got one tip to go for a server type system (we cant custom build), so we get more PCI lanes & Zeon processor. Thoughts?

From experiences I would recommend to have plenty of headroom in terms of CPU and GPU. Versions increase and requirements rise. Today it's one stream, tomorrow a second and addition ingests, records, outputs, NDI, whatever.

The more headroom the more stable the system. If wirecast is using 80%+ you will run into unexpected issues.

Both are premium. I personally like Dell and have very good experiences in terms of service and suport but HP offers equal quality and service. It's more a taste. Some specs might be a bit better with the one or the other.

My opinion is NOT to go for BMD. Take a look here at the forum what the cards cause for issues and compare to magewell, which I would prefer. The magewell you buy, install and will never cause problems. With the BMD you will have constant updates that come with trouble. If you need to go for the budget go for BMD. Best bang for the bug. If you want to have a nice unproblematic experience go for magewell.

Jens Jarke Thanks. doesnt look like Magewell has any cards that output SDI. So we may not have a choice for that but BM. On a related note. In terms of PCI bandwidth, how many lanes does one stream take up? Assuming our requirement is 2 input, 1 output, Nvidia card output to 2 monitors. How much use is that appx? Is there some guidelines around it?

For input card, again our options are limited as we need 16 channels of input/output so for now BlackMagic has the only one. We saw some comments in Reddit forum that say BM isnt as stable as they some would like, but we're hoping its ok for our more limited needs